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Six months ago, President Obama’s foreign policy looked stymied. Negotiations with Israel and the Palestinians were at a dead end. Russia was gaining ground in eastern Ukraine. U.S. efforts to end the war in Syria were ineffective. A new extremist army, Islamic State, was marching into Iraq.

As misfortunes gathered, Obama’s response was defensive — and earthy. His first principle, he said, was “Don’t do stupid s**t.”

But as strategy, that was so inadequate that it drew a public rebuke from his former secretary of State. “Great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle,” Hillary Clinton told an interviewer.

Today the picture looks different.

Last week, Obama surprised the world by normalizing U.S. relations with Cuba after a half-century freeze. Before that, he struck significant deals with China on climate change and trade. He launched a new war in Iraq, the country from which he had long promised to extricate the United States. And in a little-noted but important move, he extended a limited U.S. combat role in Afghanistan for at least another year, stretching his 2014 deadline for a pullout.

And there’s more to come. Obama still hopes to conclude a nuclear deal with Iran, a diplomatic achievement that will produce major controversy. He plans to lift as many economic sanctions on Cuba as Congress will allow. And aides say they will consider yet another attempt at Middle East peace talks if Israel’s March election produces a receptive government.

What happened?

“My presidency’s entering its fourth quarter,” Obama said at his news conference on Friday. “Interesting stuff happens in the fourth quarter.”

Has he undergone a conversion from a president bent on minimizing foreign entanglements to one who’s actively seeking opportunities for diplomatic boldness? Is he admitting he was aiming too low and risking too little?

Not really. Obama’s foreign policy was never quite as passive as its critics made it out to be — and today, it’s not quite as brilliant and visionary as administration officials try to make it sound.

What we’re seeing, instead, is how circumstance, luck, plus a measure of diplomatic skill, can bring about a run of better-than-average results.

Some of it is the slow ripening of efforts launched long ago. The talks with Cuba took 18 months, plus a push from Pope Francis. The climate deal with China was more than a year in the making. The nuclear talks with Iran have been under way even longer.

U.S. diplomacy has benefited from one huge piece of luck: the increase in North American oil production and the drop in world oil prices. That has made the U.S. and its allies less vulnerable economically and has reduced the running room of adversaries such as Russia and Iran.

The 2014 congressional election played a part, too. The fact that Obama has survived his last campaign has freed him to use his foreign policy powers more freely — as he did in normalizing relations with Havana. A Republican-controlled Senate won’t make his life easy, but he no longer needs to worry as much about the electoral impact on Democrats if, for example, he concludes a nuclear deal with Iran.

And part of Obama’s recent activism hasn’t, strictly speaking, been at his own initiative; he’s been forced to react to unwanted events, including Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the rise of Islamic State. In Afghanistan, he agreed to continue U.S. combat support for the Afghan armed forces after U.S. military officials warned that without American help, Kabul’s forces could quickly crumble.

In the end, the pillars of Obama’s foreign policy haven’t changed. He’s still avoiding most invitations to employ U.S. military power in foreign conflicts; there’s no appetite for getting more directly involved in Syria or for supplying weapons to Ukraine. He’s still persuaded that diplomatic engagement is most likely to bear fruit with adversaries — hence the talks with Cuba and the widening of discussions with Iran to include the future of Syria and Iraq.

And even though he has revived the Clinton-era slogan of the U.S. as “the indispensable nation,” Obama is still trying to adjust the goals and means of U.S. diplomacy to a world in which the United States has less absolute power, less money and less appetite for military adventures.

And his administration is still capable of diplomatic missteps. David Rothkopf, a former Clinton administration official and author of National Insecurity: American Leadership in an Age of Fear, wrote recently: “It is hard to think of a recent president who has grown so little in office.”

I asked Rothkopf last week whether the administration’s recent successes had caused him to revise his assessment. Not yet, he said.

Obama’s fourth-quarter foreign policy looks better than it did six months ago. But for good and ill, a lot can happen in two years — and it will.

Doyle McManus is a columnist for The Los Angeles Times. Readers may send him email at doyle.mcmanus@latimes.com

With a deranged narcissist in the Oval Office and his lackey controlling the Department of Justice, there is no point in looking to the federal government to curb police violence. Instead, President Donald J. Trump will do everything in his power to encourage it. In the wake of protests over the murder of George Floyd, he has demanded that governors crack down on protestors: "You have to dominate. ... If you don't dominate, you're wasting your time," he told them.

Moreover, most local police authorities are under local control -- mayors, city councils, district attorneys, police chiefs, sheriffs. That's where the accountability for police misconduct begins.

<p>But Congress could take a significant step toward reining in that misconduct by passing a bill to end the practice of allowing the Pentagon to give surplus war equipment to local police departments. There is simply no good reason for police in any city -- from Washington to Wichita -- to roll down the streets in armored personnel carriers, armed with battering rams and grenade launchers. They are not going to war. American citizens are not enemy combatants.</p><p>Several Democrats have already announced their intention to introduce legislation to end the practice. Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, has said he would introduce such a measure as an amendment to the all-important annual defense policy bill -- which would give it a decent shot at passing since Republicans are deeply invested in the defense bill.</p><script async="" src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script>
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</script><p>After protests broke out in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 following the fatal shooting of Michael Brown by a police officer, local law enforcement authorities took to the streets in armored carriers, further inflaming tensions. They showed little inclination toward restraint or de-escalation. The same thing is occurring in cities around the country right now.</p><p>Off-loading surplus military hardware to local police departments was never a good idea. The practice started back during the 1990s as violent crime peaked and local and federal authorities were feverishly devoted to winning the so-called war on drugs. After the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the program ramped up, doling out battlefield gear even to small towns no self-respecting terrorist ever heard of.</p><p>Law enforcement agents became enamored of images of themselves decked out like soldiers on special-ops missions. According to <em>The New York Times</em>, the website of a South Carolina sheriff's department featured its SWAT team "dressed in black with guns drawn, flanking an armored vehicle that looks like a tank and has a mounted .50-caliber gun."</p><p>Poor neighborhoods are subjected to the military-style hardware much more often than affluent ones. And the consequence of that sort of policing is often less safety, not more. When the police behave like an occupying force, the residents return the favor -- treating them with suspicion and contempt. That hardly makes it more likely that police will get the information they need to solve crimes.</p><p>The administration of President Barack Obama understood that and curbed the Pentagon program after Ferguson. In the final years of the Obama administration, the Pentagon reported that local law enforcement agencies had returned 126 tracked armored vehicles, 138 grenade launchers and 1,623 bayonets, the Times said. Pause for a moment just to consider that. Why would any police department -- even New York City's army of 36,000 officers -- need bayonets and grenade launchers? Once you implant in the heads of police officers the notion that they need battlefield gear, their use of violence against unarmed citizens escalates as a natural consequence.</p><script async="" src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script>
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</script><p>But guess what happened when Trump took office? He removed Obama's restraints on the Pentagon program, once again allowing local law enforcement agents to go to battle against the citizens they are sworn to protect. No surprise there. In 2017, Trump gave a speech in which he urged police officers not to worry about injuring a suspect during an arrest.</p><p>Police violence against black people is a problem as old as the nation itself. It didn't start with Trump's presidency and won't end when it's over. Rather, the racist culture that is embedded among so many law enforcement agencies showed itself clearly when major police unions enthusiastically backed Trump's election. When Trump is finally gone, the campaign to eradicate that culture can begin in earnest.</p>